The first sound in There Will Be Blood is not a voice, but a breath — the echo of effort inside a hole carved into the earth. A man swings a pickaxe in near silence, surrounded by rock, dust, and the slow arithmetic of survival. There is no audience, no applause, no promise yet of wealth. Only labor, patience, and an almost religious commitment to going deeper. Entrepreneurship, the film seems to suggest from its opening frames, does not begin with vision. It begins with endurance.
Released in 2007 and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood is ostensibly about oil, but oil is merely the medium. What the film is truly excavating is ambition once it has been stripped of social obligation. Daniel Plainview, played with ferocious restraint by Daniel Day-Lewis, is an entrepreneur before the word acquired its modern sheen. He is not a founder chasing disruption; he is a force, moving forward because stopping would require reflection.
The central entrepreneurial theme here is extraction — not just of resources, but of trust, loyalty, and ultimately meaning. Plainview builds an empire through contracts and handshakes, through carefully modulated charm that flickers on and off like a low lamp. His language is transactional even when it pretends to be communal. He speaks of family values, shared prosperity, the future — all while standing slightly apart, already calculating exits. This is entrepreneurship as performance, where sincerity is a tactic and intimacy a liability.
Anderson’s camera understands power as posture. Plainview is often framed alone, his silhouette cutting through wide landscapes or enclosed rooms with equal dominance. The environments change — desert, church, parlor — but the dynamic does not. Leadership here is not collaborative; it is architectural. The film constructs a world of long shadows, wooden desks, oil-stained ledgers, and ticking clocks. Time is always present, not as urgency, but as accumulation. Deals compound. Resentments ferment.
What There Will Be Blood reveals about human nature is unsettling in its clarity. Ambition does not necessarily want companionship. It wants clearance. Plainview’s genius is inseparable from his misanthropy. He does not trust markets because he does not trust people. His famous confession — that he has a “competition in him” — is not bravado, but diagnosis. Success, for him, is not winning; it is ensuring others lose.
Failure, in this film, is not financial. It is relational. Plainview succeeds at scale while hollowing out the structures that might have softened him. The surrogate son becomes an inconvenience. Partnership becomes betrayal. Faith becomes theater. Each institution that promises meaning is exposed as either a rival or a costume. Entrepreneurship here is a narrowing tunnel: every step forward reduces the available exits.
Culturally, There Will Be Blood occupies a crucial place in the mythology of business. It rejects the comforting narrative that visionaries are misunderstood heroes. Instead, it asks a quieter, more dangerous question: what if the system rewards the very traits that corrode the soul? In an era where founders are celebrated for relentlessness, the film feels less like a period piece and more like a mirror. The language may be older, but the psychology is current.
For modern entrepreneurs — and for the empresario — the film serves as a cautionary counterweight. It exposes the fragility of identity when success becomes the sole organizing principle. Plainview wins every negotiation and loses every mirror. There is no one left to reflect him back to himself. Glass, when it appears, does not offer insight — only distortion. Power without interruption becomes solipsism.
The final act, set in a cavernous private room, feels less like a conclusion than a locked door. Plainview has achieved total autonomy, and it has cost him everything that might have complicated it. This is the lonely architecture of leadership taken to its extreme: a world designed so efficiently that no one else can live in it.
There Will Be Blood is not warning entrepreneurs against ambition. It is warning them against mistaking motion for meaning. Forward movement, unexamined, can become a kind of tyranny — over others, and over oneself. In the end, the film leaves us with a man who has conquered the landscape and lost the interior. The oil flows. Time stops. And nothing remains to be built.
Louie Molina is the host and architect of The Empresario. Drawing from years of financial design and strategic consulting, he created The Empresario Reserve as the ultimate repositioning strategy — a system that turns financial instruments into instruments of control.
